The Sims Font Files (.ffn)

Hello, guys! I just found out for this project and I am amazed. I hope you will resurrect this awesome game.

The first part: I was unpacking .far and .iff files of The Sims Complete Collection in order to change the localization of the game, hoping it would support Cyrillic considering it has Russian slot which isn't used. Unfortunately, it doesn't support it. After some searching, I found an unofficial Russian patch for the game. I compared the two installations in order to find out which files are different, and I realized the .FFN font files inside "UIGraphics.far" package are modified. Considering my native language has some additional Cyrillic characters which aren't present in Russian, I would need your help with editing the .FFN fonts. I attached the original .FFN files and the ones from the Russian patch, hoping it would be easier for you to analyze them. These fonts are used in many EA Games, not just in The Sims, and I'm afraid no one's been able to crack them yet.

The second part: I installed The Sims Online to see if they changed the way they are dealing with fonts, and they actually did. I found the regular .TTF file (simdialogue-uni-game.ttf) inside the "TSOClient\uigraphics\fonts" directory, which is cool. I installed it on my system, but the font doesn't support Cyrillic characters nor the special Latin characters used in my language (yeah, it's weird, my language has two different scripts evenly used, Cyrillic and Latin). I changed a localization file, and the game displays the Cyrillic characters normally, but they are different than the Latin ones (pretty wide and uglier), and once again, there are no special Cyrillic characters used in my language. I figured out that TSO uses .FFN files from the "TSOClient\uigraphics\fonts\russian" directory, which are uneditable for now. I also tried to replace the "simdialogue-uni-game.ttf" with another font, but the game crashes. A solution for this would probably be to edit the .TTF file and add Cyrillic characters (including Љљ, Њњ, Ђђ, Ћћ, Џџ) and the special Latin ones (Čč, Ćć, Đđ) into it, so I can actually translate TSO. I hope you have someone who can deal with this issue.

I would be so grateful if you help me with this. Thank you in advance!

P.S. I forgot about one thing. The Sims Complete Collection actually displays the special Latin characters I mentioned in the brackets above when I replace the original .FFN files with the ones inside the Polish directory, but this procedure cannot be applied to TSO considering it uses the .TTF file instead.

For font rendering right now, we currently prerender to sprite fonts that are distributed with our client. Because of this, inclusion of extra character sets will make the spritefont huge, so we might need to look into another solution. Cyrillic can be rendered with our current setup, the compiler will probably just choose the first sans-serif windows font it can find that supports it.

I hope you find another solution for this. What about FFN fonts? Can anyone of you find a way to 'crack' it? As I already said, I need it so I can add the missing Cyrillic characters in The Sims. It would be useful for other modding communities; I remember reading on NBA Live forums that they couldn't change the font in a game because it uses FFN format too; the same thing goes for some other EA games.

A user from another forum managed to figure out the FFN format and he posted PNG images (Textures folder inside the ZIP). It's from the game EA SPORTS Cricket 07, but it shouldn't be any different from The Sims' FFN files.

Font 5, for example:

Can anyone of you crack the FFN files from The Sims and share the script for decompressing and reimporting the files? I would greatly appreciate it.

Unfortunately, no. He is Russian, so communication is sort of a problem. I believe he decompressed it "on the fly" without creating any scripts, and he didn't say anything about how he did it. But considering he managed to do it fairly easily, I suppose it wouldn't be such a hard task for you too, guys.